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Dear Mr Henry

Here in England the hearty breakfast is the traditional English fry up of bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes, toast. I can’t help feeling that this isn’t a good way to start the day. My own breakfast is likely to be oatmeal or muesli with milk, fruit, yogurt. But if you count up the calories that’s not such a big breakfast. So what is it you have in mind when you talk about the big breakfast. Could you post some examples?

Linda Grant

Mr. Henry knows this letter comes from a genuinely British person because here in the States we employ a period after “Mr.”, a dead give-away. (In addition to being foodies, Mr. Henry’s readers are punctuation fussbudgets and style sticklers.) Mention of muesli, as well, what we here call granola is a clear clue of her European origin. Of course both names by origin are trademarks for oatmeal mixed with nuts, raisins, brown sugar, and the like. Once we all began eating our morning porridge cold, however, the old name became inappropriate. ‘Cold gruel’ is an apt coinage, perhaps, but surely one unacceptable to the marketing department.

The traditional English breakfast fry-up where even the toast is fried! The morning cholesterol stun! Yes, that is the way towards empire, my son, the appropriate beginning for a traditional English day out hiking through the Hindu Kush or dog-sledding across the Antarctic, excursions which require sensible breakfasts and sensible shoes. Once in a while the hearty fry-up does hit the spot, Mr. Henry admits, but perhaps so many calories with such a high proportion of fat in one sitting is a jolt best endured at midday, the equivalent of a heart resuscitation by electric shock. [Place metal discs on either side of the chest, shout “CLEAR!” and hit the button.]

I quite agree with your choices of morning repast, Ms. Grant, and you serve as a paragon of English practicality. Mr. Henry himself always takes fruit in the morning, a banana at first, the gentlest of fruit, and then at the end of the meal something pulpy like melon, berries, or the pitted fruits – most delicious of all foods.

Rolled oats, and in this Mr. Henry parts with tradition rather dramatically, he eats raw, sometimes with plain yogurt and sometimes without. The crunch is very satisfying, the oats provide fodder for intestinal rumination, and the fiber encourages digestion while protecting against shocks delivered by the New York Times.

In the late 18th century, the rise of wage labor meant the English working man took his lunch at the job site, a lunch that normally consisted of a slice of cheese and bread with a cup of tea. The hot sugared drink took the place of a proper home-cooked meal and became one of the great adaptations of the modern world, a necessary element in the rise of industrialization. The traditional English fry-up is, Mr. Henry believes, a hold-over from a gentleman’s breakfast, not a working man’s breakfast, and reflects an abundance of expensive victuals. In our world when the cost of basic foodstuffs has become an expenditure smaller than the entertainment budget, eating bacon and eggs and black pudding, etc., at a single sitting is distinctly unwise.

When Mr. Henry speaks of a “big” breakfast, by the way, he does not mean the traditional morning offering at an NFL training camp. But he does mean something larger than the much vaunted Mediterranean-diet breakfast of an espresso and a croissant or some such white flour pastry masquerading as healthy food, a breakfast best suited to the person who rises at 11:00 a.m.

Mr. Henry treats his alimentary canal with care. In his youth he had an iron stomach. Raised on TV-dinners, bologna & cheese sandwiches, and hamburgers, he could digest nearly anything. His favorite mid-morning snack from the school canteen (a holdover name from its military school days) was a Coke, Reese’s peanut butter cups, and a bag of Cheetos. He shudders to recall it, but since his adolescent stomach would not accept any breakfast whatsoever, the snack became young Henry’s breakfast long overdue. That triple-cocktail was the highest caloric mix available at the canteen.

But in 1975 a banana milkshake at the Hippie Café in Marrakech sent him crawling to his bed for two weeks, after which he could never again blithely graze the groaning board.

The intestines may have suffered but Mr. Henry’s character only strengthened. He began to establish routines, the signature of adulthood. And in life there are no more firmly rooted routines than those of breakfast.

The Japanese, for example, cannot begin the day without pickled vegetables, a curious habit Mr. Henry quickly picked up during his sojourns in Kyoto. Sashimi first thing in the morning was a habit more difficult to establish, however, but miso soup with rice (and fishy sprinkles), pickles, and a bit of egg went down nicely. Most unfortunately for western travelers, however, fruit in Japan is prohibitively expensive. Mr. Henry does not understand how the Japanese, an admirably practical island people like the British, permit themselves to remain victims of their greedy, protectionist farmers. He ruminates about this.